Choke Artist

Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, the recently embattled octogenarian inventor (his younger son is campaigning to discredit many of his contributions to medicine), has at least one thing to feel good about this year: his most abiding innovation, the Heimlich maneuver, just saved the life of the actor Mandy Patinkin, who lately found himself in the dire position of having an insufficiently masticated bit of Caesar salad lodged in his windpipe.

It was a sunny afternoon at Louie’s, a café on the Upper West Side. Patinkin, his wife, Kathryn Grody, their teen-age son, Gideon Grody-Patinkin, and a friend were having a convivial lunch. “I was laughing, and all of a sudden something went down the wrong way and got stuck,” Patinkin said. “First, I’m in complete shock—‘I’m choking!’ ”

Here’s where things get weird: only three weeks earlier, Patinkin had wrapped a movie, a drama that is set in a New York diner and whose primary plot concern is the trauma, both literal and metaphorical, of tracheal blockage. Its main character is a shy immigrant dishwasher who seems to identify with the faceless figure—that familiar hybrid of Blue Man Group member and crash-test dummy—on the Heimlich poster that hangs next to his sink. Patinkin plays his boss. When a customer gets a fish bone caught in his throat, Patinkin’s character and his employees perform all the wrong maneuvers (backslapping, pointlessly imploring him to “take a breath!”), and the dishwasher performs all the right ones (namely, the Heimlich). The movie, which is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, is called “Choking Man.”

“So there I am choking,” Patinkin went on, “and now it’s escalating, and I’m panicking.” Patinkin had spent weeks researching asphyxiation scenarios, and they were now turning into real life, like some kind of reverse-Method nightmare. The others at the table had no idea about the nature of Patinkin’s latest role or the correct first-aid procedure. “We’ve been in therapy,” Grody explained, “and we don’t talk about work at home.” Patinkin knew exactly what to do, but, of course, he couldn’t speak.

“I’m such a goofball and a kidder, my mind is saying, ‘Oh, my God, they think I’m screwing around,’ ” Patinkin said. “So I stood up, and I started jumping up and down, like a kangaroo or a rabbit.” Finally, Gideon got up and yelled, “Does anybody know CPR?” “In that moment, I’m going, ‘I’m a dead man,’ ” Patinkin said. “He thinks I’m having a heart attack.” A young woman ran over, thrust her hands around Patinkin’s abdomen, and gave him the Heimlich, which she’d seen on TV. Patinkin spat out a chunk of food and started to breathe. The check, he said, was “gratis-ed.”

Politicians also choke with alarming frequency. John Kerry saved a fellow-senator from a near-lethal apple sliver. When Ed Koch was mayor, he gagged on a piece of pork, but, to avoid the ire of Jewish voters, said it was a sprig of watercress. Ronald Reagan almost died trying to swallow a peanut, as did Ehud Barak. And then there’s George W. Bush, who passed out in the process of eating a pretzel stick, performing a sort of auto-Heimlich.

In “Choking Man,” Patinkin’s character says to the shaken customer, who has just vomited, in a cinematic slo-mo arc, all over his shirt, “You know, Elizabeth Taylor was Heimliched. You’re in good company.” Elizabeth Taylor, it turns out, actually belongs in both categories. Twenty-two years before choking on a chicken bone, she saved Montgomery Clift from swallowing his own teeth.

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